SCION Association SCION Association ETH Zuerich The Internet has been successful beyond even the most optimistic expectations and is intertwined with many aspects of our society. But although the world-wide communication system guarantees global reachability, the Internet has not primarily been built with security and high availability in mind. The next-generation inter-network architecture SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation On Next- generation networks) aims to address these issues. SCION was explicitly designed from the outset to offer security and availability by default. The architecture provides route control, failure isolation, and trust information for end-to-end communication. It also enables multi-path routing between hosts. This document discusses the motivations behind the SCION architecture and gives a high-level overview of its fundamental components, including its authentication model and the setup of the control- and data plane. As SCION is already in production use today, the document concludes with an overview of SCION deployments. For detailed descriptions of SCION's components, refer to [I-D.dekater-scion-pki], [I-D.dekater-scion-controlplane], and [I-D.dekater-scion-dataplane]. A more detailed analysis of relationships and dependencies between components is available in [I-D.rustignoli-scion-components].